Intel's redemos six-core Gulftown

Intel has given developers another peek at its upcoming Core i7-980X Extreme Edition processor. Intel's plans for the six-core, 12-thread, 32nm Core i7-980X - formerly code-named Gulftown - were made clear by the venue for the demo: the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC 2010) taking place this week in San Francisco. New …

[JB]

"Grandad...

...tell me about the days when processors only had one core!"

[Anonymous Coward]

@ Grandad...

"...tell me about the days when processors only had one core!"

what You didnt like he transputer CPU back in the day?

http://www.wotug.org/transputer.shtml

"The Transputer

The INMOS Transputer was a pioneering parallel computing processor of the 1980s from the Welsh chip design company INMOS. It the first general purpose microprocessor designed specifically to be used in parallel. The design of the Transputer included serial links that allowed it to communicate with up to four other Transputers.

Transputer instructions comprised 8-bit words broken into two 4-bit nibbles. The high-order nibble contained the instruction code. The "lower" nibble contained data, either for arithmetic operations, for addressing memory, or as an operand to the indirect opcode, which was used to add more instructions to those available using the the 16 possible using a nibble. Of the 16 opcodes available, 3 were set aside for special purposes: one was "prefix", and added a new nibble to the current data item; one was negative-prefix, performing the same function as prefix but providing a negative rather than positive value, and one was operate, which took the currently assembled value and used it as an opcode. This scheme permitted a very dense instruction format, with as many as 4 useful instructions possible in a single 32-bit memory word. The normal average was a little over 2, because of the need to load constants in more than one operation.

One big advantage of this scheme was that it permitted 16 bit and 32-bit transputers to share the same binary format and, in many cases, the same compiled programs.

...."

[Anonymous Coward]

Son...

I remember when you still got change out of 16k.

[Anonymous Coward]

great , but why not go directly to 8 cores !

Now intel bods and others etc with the samples ,tell us how much faster is a current x264 http://x264.nl/ HD 1080P Encode running on these six-core Gulftown compared to say your old Intel-Core-2-Quad-Q8400-2.66GHz, your i7 Quad 1.6Hgz laptop , and top of the line i7 desktop quads ?

real world tests for the real world.

[Mage]

Grandad

In my Grandad's day they used relays to build computers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_%28computer%29

Later in my Dad's day, they used transistors. Those computers had 1000's of cores. One little core for each bit of storage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_store

My first computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SC/MP

Mine's the one with a pocket full of little black beads.

[James Turner]

Mac Pros

Mac Pros use dual-socket Xeon 5500s, rather than the single-socket Core i7 line.

So the upgrade would be likely to be the dual-socket Xeon 56xx range rather than a i7-980X. Going from a pair of quad-cores to a single hex-core would normally be considered a downgrade.

[John Hicks]

THG got their hands on one.

Dont know whether this will make it past the moderatrix, but Toms Hardware Guide got their hands on one and benched it.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/core-i7-980x-gulftown,review-31832.html

May be worth updating the story with the clocks from there.

[cmaurand]

As opposed to Operon's 12 cores

Due later this month. Opterons are already 6 core and hyper-threading is a gimmick. Opterons already run more instructions per clock cycle than any Intel chip.

[Anonymous Coward]

Did no one watch Terminator?

The end is nigh!